Pat Dollard

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Politico:

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody last night, Obama didn’t dispute the theory that McCain is portraying him as the antichrist — though an aide said he didn’t intend to respond directly to that part of the question, and that he disagrees with Democrats who think McCain’s advertising campaign has sought to cast Obama as the Antichrist.

From the interview:

Brody: Let me ask you a little about some of these ads that John McCain has been running not just on television, but on the web. Let’s face it, let’s call a spade a spade, there has been some Messianic references, there’s been some antichrist stuff going on, the celebrity, they’re trying to pigeonhole you a certain way. Do you believe this is being done on purpose?

Obama: Well of course it’s being done on purpose. They’re not spending a whole bunch of money to make me out as a good guy. They’re engaging in the kind of politics that I think we’ve become accustomed to which is you try to tear your opponents down and you engage in sort of slash and burn tactics. And very personal sort of personal character attacks. And one of the challenges for us in this campaign is how do you make sure those attacks are answered quickly and forcefully, but also truthfully and that we don’t fall into that same kind of tactic. And look, I think ultimately the American people are going to understand by the time they go into the polling place in November that this is not an election about me. This an election about them – ordinary people, their lives, their hopes their dreams, the fact that their incomes have gone down over the last eight years, the fact that their jobs are less secure, that they have less retirement security, that their kids can’t afford college, that jobs are being shipped overseas that the tax code isn’t fair and that special interests have come to dominate Washington. And as long as we’re communicating an active plan to fix those problems then I think we’re going to do well.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the first part of Obama’s answer — that “it’s being done on purpose” — was a general statement on attacks, and that the suggestion that he was concurring with, or not disputing, Brody’s specific examples “is completely ludicrous.”

Obama doesn’t believe McCain is trying to cast him as the Antichrist, Burton said.

Obama has imagined devious motives in his opponents in the past. He suggested during the primary that the successive waves of viral e-mails were deliberately, “systematically” timed to caucuses and primaries.

From the Time Magazine article with accusations of McCain telling America that Obama was the Anti-Christ:

It’s not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the Antichrist might just do it.

That’s just what some outraged Christian supporters of the Democratic nominee are claiming John McCain’s campaign did in an ad called “The One” that was recently released online. The Republican nominee’s advisers brush off the charges, arguing that the spot was meant to be a “creative” and “humorous” way of poking fun at Obama’s popularity by painting him as a self-appointed messiah. But even this innocuous interpretation of the ad — which includes images of Charlton Heston as Moses and culled clips that make Obama sound truly egomaniacal — taps into a conversation that has been gaining urgency on Christian radio and political blogs and in widely circulated e-mail messages that accuse Obama of being the Antichrist.

The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain’s top media gurus as well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. It first caught the attention of Democrats familiar with the Left Behind series, a fictionalized account of the end-time that debuted in the 1990s and has sold nearly 70 million books worldwide. “The language in there is so similar to the language in the Left Behind books,” says Tony Campolo, a leading progressive Evangelical speaker and author.

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